Chapter 219: The Consequences of My Own Actions Continue To Be Extremely Rude

Terrorist was already winding up, Quantum energy coiling along her golden scales in swirling waves, when Curious’ voice cut through the dark air.

“Stop.”

Huh. I looked around. Curious had drifted a bit back from the Fold’s entrance, head tilted, eyes narrowed at nothing I could see. Which was concerning, because Curious never looked at nothing. She always looked at something, and the fact that I couldn’t immediately tell what that something was made me a bit… uncertain.

Terrorist froze mid-windup, tail still raised, expression cycling rapidly from confusion to disappointment to the dawning horror that her fun was about to be revoked.

Curious spoke again, still staring at the empty air around us. “Main Body. Does everything not feel… too pristine?”

I opened my mouth to say something dismissive. Closed it. Opened it again.

Huh.

She was right.

I narrowed my eyes and looked around. Properly looked this time. The area around the Fold was indeed pristine. We’d stopped seeing any wraiths a while back, which I’d chalked up to the Fold being a Kovrath stronghold. Made sense they’d clear out the local pests. Fortresses didn’t exactly let monsters loiter at the front gate.

But the more I actually thought about it, the more the wrongness settled into my bones.

I looked down at Dorrusk. He was still positioned slightly behind me, posture deferential but not currently attempting to become one with the dirt, which counted as progress.

“You lot do routine sweeps around here, right?” I asked, because that sounded plausible. “Keep the monster population down?”

Dorrusk nodded immediately. “Yes, Master. When their numbers swell beyond what the Fold can comfortably sustain, we cull the excess. However…” His brow furrowed. “We do not eliminate them entirely. The Shadow creatures are valuable to us. Their hides, their cores, and more importantly, their nature. They share our connection to the Shadow Dimension. During incursion preparations, we deliberately leave populations intact, they become… assets.”

I raised a metaphorical eyebrow. “Assets how?” Did that mean someone among them could actually control or herd the things?

“The Third Elder possesses the ability to subdue and direct them,” he said. “A limited number of wraiths, kept near the Fold, serve as an early warning system and a disposable frontline. They are more useful alive than dead, especially now.”

Seemed like my guess was right.

Especially now, huh.

I felt my eyes narrow. And yet, we hadn’t seen a single one. First possibility: we’d scared them all off somehow. Which didn’t make much sense, because we never hunted around the Fold, and these monsters didn’t strike me as the type to send out warning messages. Plus, I was pretty sure we’d hunted down ninety-nine percent of the ones that tried to run. They just couldn’t outrun four of us.

Dorrusk’s silence was answer enough. He looked troubled.

Curious had drifted back toward us, nodding slowly. Her expression hadn’t changed, but there was a certain intensity to the way she kept scanning our surroundings.

Terrorist, who had been following this exchange with a gloomy expression, raised a claw.

“…No boom?”

The sheer heartbreak in her voice almost made me reconsider.

“Hold that thought,” I said, and Terrorist’s tail drooped so dramatically it nearly carved a trench in the ground.

I turned my attention back to the problem. It took me a few seconds to catch up to Curious’ train of thought. The fucking air. That was what she’d meant by too pristine! Not just the absence of monsters. The mana density around us was almost perfectly even. No fluctuations, no pockets of thicker or thinner energy, just a smooth, uniform blanket. That didn’t happen naturally. Mana pooled and eddied like water, disturbed by living things, by residual spellwork, by the simple fact of creatures existing in a space.

This air had been scrubbed. I’d seen it done plenty of times when Alice performed divination. Cleansing the area, she called it. But that was always limited to a room, and that one time it was limited a single patch of forest in Veilwoods. I’d never seen a cleansing this massive. What kind of monster could have done it?

“Precisely,” Curious said, appearing beside me, practically reading my mind. “The ambient mana signature suggests deliberate, thorough sanitization. As if someone wanted to remove evidence of their presence entirely.”

A cold, unpleasant feeling coiled in my gut. The Ice Key materialized around my wrist, I already knew the answer. But I wanted to consider alternatives first.

“Could the Depth Dwellers already be moving?” I asked Dorrusk. “Some kind of advance force?”

He shook his head firmly. “No, Master. The Depth Dwellers are many things. They are brutal, relentless, suicidally aggressive, but subtle they are not. They do not prepare ground. They do not clean. They announce themselves with screams and seismic charges. It is their way. If they were here, we would know. The ground itself would be howling.”

“Could it just be your elders? Maybe they cleansed the space for… some reason, I don’t know? Preparing some kind of ritual or spell?” Even I sounded uncertain as I said it. They had no reason to cleanse an area that was already beneficial. Dorrusk confirmed it.

Right.

So not Depth Dwellers or Kovraths. Which left…

A thought started forming as I fed mana into the Key. But the moment the intent crystallized, I didn’t get to finish it.

Because directly beneath my feet, a massive amount of mana suddenly began to build.

It wasn't Terrorist. She was still standing a few paces away, mournfully examining her claws. But even she snapped into focus the instant we all sensed it. I grabbed Dorrusk and shattered the ground beneath my feet, launching into the air in a split second.

I barely had time to process the rising mana before the Key around my wrist flared cold, and I fed it even more mana and watched the hungry cold surge through it.

My instincts had already moved half a second earlier. I poured everything into the Key's [Dreamtide Interment] ability.

I was suddenly, horribly certain it was the Water Leviathan. I didn't know what it was doing here and I didn't have time to think about it.

A pulse of absolute zero rippled outward through the Dream Sea. The ability description had been clinical about it: flash-freezing lurking Dream Sea entities, encasing them mid-movement, leaving them unable to act for as long as I could sustain the mana cost. The temperature around us crashed so hard my breath fogged into frozen clouds. Even my thoughts dragged for a fraction of a second.

Then something was wrong.

I hadn't felt any further mana drain. Not a single point. Dreamtide Interment was supposed to keep siphoning mana to maintain the freeze on whatever I'd trapped. If it wasn't draining me, then I hadn't successfully locked anything inside the Dream Sea.

But how?

I'd been certain the Water Leviathan was behind this. The Key had been created as a direct counter to her. That specific ability was built to seize entities attuned to Water. If the Key wasn't even straining to keep it contained, then there was only one conclusion left, and it directly contradicted the only explanation that made any sense.

That explanation made no sense either, because why in the ever-loving hells would the Water Leviathan be coming after me? I had the one artifact designed to shut her down. This was like a mouse deciding to hunt a cat.

And below us, that massive mana buildup I'd half expected to erupt into some explosive trap had turned out to be nothing. The concentration had been intense, but it hadn't led anywhere. Was there some kind of ritual circle? A mana matrix? I hadn't checked. The moment I sensed that buildup, leaving had become the priority. Now the ground below was buried beneath thick, tangible darkness, and that monstrous concentration of mana had vanished without a trace.

"Main Body," Curious said, her voice cutting through the frozen air. "The ambient mana signature just shifted. Something is bleeding through the surface. Multiple signatures."

I'd already picked up on it through Air Sense the moment it happened.

The ground where the mana had vanished wasn't empty anymore. Shapes were materializing. Solidifying from nothing like fog condensing into flesh. Massive hunched forms with elongated limbs and heads that looked like someone had tried to sculpt a fish and a dragon from the same lump of nightmare. The figure at the front was enormous, carrying a trident crackling with enough mana to make my teeth ache from seventy meters up.

More appeared behind it.

Dozens.

Hundreds.

An entire Thalador-damned army was blinking into existence second by second.

Dorrusk, still clutched in my claws, let out a small broken sound.

"Depth Dwellers," he breathed. "But how... h-how could they appear here? Teleportation magic? But there's no anchor. No mind powerful enough to sustain mass teleportation on this scale. They aren't even clever enough to send elders first to establish a foothold, and yet—"

He stopped.

His slitted eyes locked onto the horde below, horror slowly spreading across his face. I knew what he was seeing. This matched nothing I had learned about them.

"Why are they so calm? They should be frothing. Screaming. Attacking the first living thing they see. Clawing at the gates of the Fold. They're never this still. It's almost like..."

I thought I knew why. I had a guess, anyway.

Because a single form had materialized high above them in the sky.

She hung there, wreathed in drifting blue lights that I recognized after a moment as glowing jellyfish. Translucent, ethereal, orbiting her like living jewelry. Her face was Avena's face— the same features I'd seen before— but everything else was wrong. A pale and flowing bridal gown draped her form. A veil hid half her expression, but I could still see the deadpan curiosity in her eyes. Two horns rose from her head, wound with white roses that should have been beautiful but instead looked like they'd been placed there by a mortician. Her hair was the colour of ocean water, currents moving through it even though the air was still.

The Water Leviathan. Wearing Avena like a coat.

"I must say," she said, twirling a strand of ocean hair around one finger, "I hadn't expected you to be this cautious. Studying your previous patterns, I was almost certain you'd make this work easier for me."

Her gaze drifted sideways, landing on Curious. Something flickered across her expression, I caught that as annoyance, maybe. Or was it respect? Hard to tell under the veil.

“But it seems I failed to account for the full influence of your… other facets.”

She tilted her head, and her tone didn't change at all when she added, “No matter. Plans are such fragile things, aren't they? One miscalculation and suddenly you're improvising. Fortunately, I do enjoy alternatives.”

She raised a hand. The depth dwellers below, who had been standing like statues with blank eyes, suddenly snapped to attention. A wave of alertness rippled through the entire army, thousands of heads swiveling upward in perfect synchronization. Whatever docility had been holding them was gone.

I didn't need Curious to piece this together. The Ice Leviathan itself had been the counter to the Water Leviathan's influence. That was probably why the Depth Dwellers worshipped the damn thing! It was their only shield against being enslaved by a creature that could drown minds as easily as bodies. And by killing it, by carving its corpse into this Key, we'd handed the Water Leviathan the one thing it had perhaps always wanted.

A whole population with zero protection. A worshipper base ripe for the taking.

Why the fuck did I not think of that? Granted, I was still theorizing, and that theory had implications of its own, but it didn't change the bigger picture.

The entire ecosystem had been balanced on a knife's edge. Break one thread and the whole thing unraveled. That had been the philosophy of this entire trial from the beginning.

And now it was too late to realize it. Not that it would've changed anything. What was I supposed to do? Not kill it? Let it eventually eat me? Ignore the Keys?

Hindsight's a bitch.

My eyes hardened as I studied the army.

Three of the depth dwellers below radiated Gold Core pressure. The big one with the trident was the obvious leader, but the two flanking him weren't far behind. I could feel their mana from here, and even that felt hungry, like their power wanted to eat me as badly as they did. And what if they could utilize divinity too?

The Water Leviathan— I refused to call her Avena— twirled her hand in a lazy circle, and the space around her began to warp. She spared me one last glance over her shoulder, veil fluttering in a wind that didn't exist.

“Contain her,” she commanded, and vanished.

The depth dwellers didn't waste a second. Light flooded back into their eyes, but it wasn't the mindless rage I'd heard about. Instead there was focus. There's something deeply, existentially wrong about an entire army watching you with the precision of a single mind. Every set of eyes locked onto me and my clones with unified, hungry intent.

Dorrusk whimpered.

I opened my mouth to say something tactical, something commanding, something befitting a glorious golden dragon about to engage in glorious golden combat—

Space warped directly beside me.

My wings snapped open on pure screaming instinct, my brain shrieking DANGER before I even knew what I was reacting to. One of my tentacles tore clean off with a wet, meaty sound I felt more than heard. That could have been my head. Half a second slower and it would have been my head. White-hot pain lanced through my side just as Terrorist and Curious surged past me.

Ah.

So that's how this was going to go.

Then all hell broke loose.